International

In this episode of the weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Cato Institute policy analyst Dan Ikenson about how international trade is not a scoreboard to measure a nation’s economic success against other countries, but the best way to improve the lives of everyday Americans, and everyday people all over the world.

Here in the United States, Net Neutrality exponentially increases the government’s ability to tax the Internet. Starting with the 17.4% Universal Service Fund (USF) tax. Which goes up automatically every calendar quarter. And goes up each and every time three unelected Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bureaucrats decide they want more of our coin. Which they just did in December –with a 17.1% rate increase.

At the end of January, the Obama administration announced the next step in a long process that could result in the exploration and ultimate extraction of oil-and-gas resources of the U.S. mid-Atlantic—something the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Governors Coalition supports. On March 30, the 60-day comment period ends. If everything goes well, we could see new American resources on the market in twenty years.

In late October I wrote a commentary “Is America in Decline?” based on a book by James MacDonald, “When Globalism Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana”, due for sale in January from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Within days I received “The Accidental Super Power: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and The Coming Global Disorder” by Peter Zeihan.